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RE: Just out of curiosity - ratio of TW to training? or Marketing?
Subject:RE: Just out of curiosity - ratio of TW to training? or Marketing? From:"McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com> To:Hannah Drake <hannah -at- formulatrix -dot- com>, Julie Stickler <jstickler -at- gmail -dot- com> Date:Tue, 17 Dec 2013 16:13:34 -0500
I can't speak to the first two, 'cuz both Training and Marketing live in another country, and there are writers in several other countries, but I'd say that for our office:
TW: Engineers 3:~70
TW: Support 3:6
Of course, we are just getting our third writer in January, and we recently absorbed another company that has no writers and about 20 employees who now share our office, but haven't been "integrated" yet, and the corporation bought another company in (mostly) California whose products and development we are taking on, but of which only two engineers (out of dozens) are actually making the move to the Great White North (it was -26 degrees C overnight without the wind-chill, and got up to -12 C on this fine Fall day ) and the rest are bailing or being booted. All of which to say, Hannah's numbers are probably a good rough guess for our numbers.
-----Original Message-----
From: Hannah Drake
Sent: December-17-13 1:52 PM
To: Julie Stickler
Cc: Technical Writing
Subject: Re: Just out of curiosity - ratio of TW to training? or Marketing?
(I added the support team since I think documentation definitely aids support and vice versa, at least with us)
On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Julie Stickler <jstickler -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> I've seen discussions of the ratio of technical writers to engineers,
> and what the idea ratio should be (and the answer, as with all things,
> seems to be "it depends").
>
> But have we ever had a discussion of either of the following?
>
> Ratio of technical writers to members of the training department (at
> my current gig it is 2 to 1, previous job it was 3 to 2, before that 1
> to 1, tends to be similar staffing levels).
>
> Ratio of technical writers to members of the marketing department? (at
> my current gig it is 2 TW to 14 in marketing. I can't say that I've
> ever thought to look before now. So I have no idea what is typical.)
>
>
>
> What about at your place of employment?
>
> --
> Julie Stickler
>http://heratech.wordpress.com/
> Blogging about Agile and technical writing
>
>
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Hannah L. Drake
Lead Technical Documentation Specialist
Formulatrix, Inc.
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